Already £200,000 of licence fee payers’ money has been spent on legal advice for BBC staff giving evidence to the probes

BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten today revealed the cost of the two inquiries into the Jimmy Savile and Newsnight scandals could run to millions of pounds.

In a heated session in front of the Commons Culture Media and Sport committee, the Tory peer said the Pollard Review into Newsnight’s decision to pull an investigation into Savile, is expected to be completed by Christmas, but a second review led by Dame Janet Smith, looking at the practices of the BBC could take much longer.

Already £200,000 of licence fee payers’ money has been spent on legal advice for BBC staff giving evidence to the probes.

And Lord Patten said it was impossible to predict how much the inquiries would cost.

He said: “We don’t yet know, but they will clearly be expensive, partly because of the number of lawyers involved.

“The Pollard inquiry has a QC who does the questioning at each session and I am told that QCs don’t come cheap.

“I don’t see how we could conceivably set down a capped cost without seeming to cap the work of the inquiries,” he told the MPs.

He was then put on the defensive about his own workload as BBC Trust Chairman.

When asked by Tory MP Philip Davies for a breakdown of how many hours he spent at the Corporation, he snapped: “Certainly not, it’s impertinent question.”

Lord Patten also hit out at the tone of the questioning, adding: “I think you’re entitled to know how much time I’m spending, I think you’re entitled to put down freedom of information requests for how many days I spend in the office, or how many days I spend doing other things.

“But if you think I am going to do a diary for you in order to satisfy some populist pursuit of somebody you didn’t want to run an organisation which you don’t want to exist, you are kidding yourself.

“Do you want to know my toilet habits? What else do you want to know?”

But Mr Davies hit back, saying: “Given you have been presiding over a shambles at the BBC I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say have you been actually putting in the hours, putting in the yard as you should have been as chairman of the BBC Trust.”

The MP then pressed Lord Patten on the appointment of George Entwistle as he revealed former BBC boss George Entwistle wanted more than a year’s salary to quit his post.

Mr Davies asked: “Do you take responsibility for spending a fortune recruiting somebody who was already under your nose then spending a fortune getting rid of him?”

MPs were told the ex-director general said that his £450,000 pay off for just 54 days work was not enough.

BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten refused to say how much Mr Entwistle had asked for to leave the post in the wake of the Jimmy Savile and Newsnight scandals and he would have preferred it if he had taken just six months pay.

Lord Patten admitted it was “one hell of a lot of money” but said the alternative was to go a tribunal which would have cost the licence fee payer an additional £80,000.

“The options I had were absolutely clear. “We either had to deal with it quickly there and then, broadly speaking on the terms of 12 months, though that was less than we were asking for, or we had to go to constructive dismissal and constructive dismissal would have landed us with exactly the same amount of money, plus almost certainly another £80,000 of unfair dismissal,” he said.

He also admitted the Trust had spent £186,000 on recruitment costs when they hired Mr Entwistle, a long-standing BBC staffer.